Posts Tagged ‘indiemapper’

[Editor's note: IndieProjector lets users approach map projection as a Web 2.0 task. Anyone can upload data and reproject into a number of useful presets. This visualization shows the geographies popular with users, their data coverage. Most users are mapping the US and parts there of. But a few things stand out to me. Iran, a couple places in Africa, and the surprising number of people who think the world ends at the Rio de la Plata, Capetown, Melbourne, and Fairbanks. Are people using a cylindrical projection for their world maps, ahem, and it's just getting too tall for the page? None the less, a neat tool. Keep up the good work!]

After a few months of indieprojector, we thought it’d be interesting to see how it’s being used. Two questions sounded particularly fun to visualize: what geographic areas being mapped with indieprojector, and what projections are the most/least popular? So I grabbed some data and generated some maps, which Mark turned into snazzy visualizations.

Indieprojector is a free web service that re-projects digital map files and converts them to SVG for use in vector graphics editing software. Map projections are an essential part of map making but we found the existing tools to be too expensive, inflexible or complicated. Indieprojector is the smarter, easier, more elegant way to reproject and convert geographic data. It’s a preview of our indiemapper technology that will bring map-making into the 21st century using web-services and a realtime visual approach to cartographic design.